Perhaps the saddest thing is that, the Chinese government and
other establishments seem to encourage the concept. For example,
China's All-China Women’s Federation, a group founded in 1949
by the Communist Party to protect women's rights, has this great
advice on its website:

Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich
and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance
will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further
their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The
tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth
less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they
are already old, like yellowed pearls.

When you think about it, any kind of hysteria over unmarried
Chinese women seems absurd. It's well known that the Chinese
government's one-child policy has left China with far more males
than females — one report
from 2007 suggested that there would be 30 million more men
of marriageable age than women by 2020. 11 of the 20 richest
self-made women in the world are Chinese, according to
Forbes.

“There is an opinion that A quality guys will find B quality
women, B quality guys will find C quality women, and C quality
men will find D quality women,” Huang Yuanyuan, a
29-year-old unmarried Chinese woman tells her. “The people left
are A quality women and D quality men. So if you are a leftover
woman, you are A quality.”

These "A quality" women have often worked and studied hard for
much of their lives, leaving their romantic lives til later.
"While you’re at university your parents constantly discourage
you from having relationships; they tell you to focus on your
studies," one so-called "leftover woman"
told the Telegraph last year.

The problem is that these "A quality" women are exactly who China
wants to be getting into relationships early, Leta
Hong-Fincher,
an American doctoral student at Tsinghua University’s Department
of Sociology, tells
Magistad.

“The Chinese population planning policy used to officially have a
law promoting eugenics; they actually had the word ‘eugenics’ in
the name,” Hong-Fincher, who has written about the imbalance
before, says. “Now they’ve changed it, because they recognize
that’s kind of offensive. But that’s what the family planning
policy is.”

The aim is twofold — not only to have the "best" people
procreating, but also to stop there being a large number of
unsatisfied male elites.